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Azure Replacing Cairo In Mozilla Firefox

07-26-2011, 03:40 PM

Phoronix: Azure Replacing Cairo In Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox -- particularly the Gecko rendering engine -- has long been a user of the Cairo graphics rendering library. Cairo is also used by GTK+, Mono, WebKit, and many other open-source projects for a vector-based, device-independent 2D drawing API. Cairo now has back-ends for OpenGL, Win32 GDI, Mac OS X Quartz, Direct2D, and many other APIs, but Mozilla developers are doing away with this library. To replace Cairo, Mozilla developers created "Azure" as a new 2D multi-platform graphics library...

Comment

# Matt on 2011-06-23 at 01:32
Are there any plans to create an XRender backend for Linux, or will those users be stuck with Cairo until you come up with a general OpenGL version?
Also, is the plan to move everything to the GL/D3D versions eventually, or would you first try D2D/Quartz and only fall back to the 3D APIs if those weren't found?

# Bas [Member] Email on 2011-06-23 at 03:21
@Matt: There was discussion, but the small market and the large difference in quality between different X-render implementations make the return on investment too low to justify. So I'm afraid they'll be stuck with cairo until we come up with our own accelerated backend.

The second part of your question depends largely on how good our versions will turn out to be. If at some point they perform better than D2D, logically we'll start using them, as long as they don't, we probably won't . Consistency is important but so is a great user experience!

I think it says what we all knew already.
Hopefully they at least enable the nvidia blobs by default since they're good enough.